“Rear Window” ethics
A philosophical review
In Rear Window, Hitchcock has created a sentient film with a moral gaze equal to our own. But it is far from the dark, brooding, and pretentious film suggested by my opening line. Rather, it is ostensibly light, containing his most celebrated heroine, ample doses of humour and romance, and some of his best cinematography. This is Hollywood, and Hitchcock, at its finest.
We open with a leisurely survey of the neighbourhood: in one stroke, we are introduced to the setting of the entire film and (almost) all its principal characters. We seamlessly move into L.B. Jeffries’s (James Stewart) apartment, and are told (as only Hitchock can tell) that it is swelteringly hot, that our protagonist’s leg is broken, his name, the identity of his fiancée, his occupation (a photographer of some daring), and that his leg was broken in a race car collision, which he nonetheless managed to photograph. All this in the space of a few seconds, with a single shot. What an absolute pleasure.
Hitchcock quickly develops a full cast of characters: Miss Torso, an attractive dancer, Miss Lonelyhearts, who hosts romantic dinners for imaginary partners, The Songwriter, who plays the same song over and over (here we are treated with a cameo, another Hitchcock classic), Miss Hearing Aid (a deaf sculptor), the newlyweds, and, finally, the travelling salesman and his invalid wife. Our first hint of trouble comes with Stella (Thelma Ritter), Jeff’s nurse from the insurance company. She purportedly predicted the 1929 stock market crash, and now intuits another kind of trouble (“The New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the workhouse.”). Stella’s intuition is seemingly confirmed when Jeffrey hears a woman’s scream in the middle of the night — so starts the investigation.
Nestled among the opening sequence is “the most perfect entrance made by an actress on film”. Jeff’s apartment is shrouded in an ominous, symbolic darkness. He is sleeping, oblivious and vulnerable. Suddenly, a glowing face appears — the fiancée who appeared earlier on the cover of a Parisian fashion magazine. Both pretend not to know each other; she introduces herself as “Lisa… Carol… Fremont”, switching on a lamp with each word. This change from darkness to light has been made much of. It could signify despair and cynicism giving way to hope and freshness. More fitting within the context of the film, it is voyeurism (darkness) being foiled by exhibitionism (light) — Lisa wants Jeff to look at her, and therefore draws him away from his temptation. But Jeffrey has eyes for all but her. We see this contrast continued throughout the film, Jeffrey retreating into darkness while watching the salesman, and Lisa donning a succession of striking outfits (and eventually a nightgown) to attract his attention.
One must bear in mind we still haven’t left (and never will leave) Jeffrey’s apartment. Hitchcock, in this film especially, is an intelligent and concise filmmaker, who also treats his audience as cognizant and intelligent. Like Jeffrey, we are fed clues through an apartment window (and in our case, the camera), and must piece together the story. As with the best of murder mysteries, we find ourselves wildly, frantically theorising, assembling a mental chart of victims and suspects, marking them with mental pins, drawing connections with imaginary string — for a moment I felt like John Nash with his magazines in A Beautiful Mind. There’s only one complication: it’s not yet clear, in fact, it seems downright unlikely, that a murder has been committed.
Jeffrey’s “peeping” makes the viewer uncomfortable; not only do we condemn his violation of others’ privacy, we also cannot get enough of it. And by watching with him, often through his perspective, we become complicit in his immorality. Even worse, we watch the watcher himself, without his consent nor even his knowledge — we are the true voyeurs. Hitchcock creates a dilemma: we cannot empathise with the rights of those being watched, and therefore cannot condemn Jeffrey’s actions, because in doing so we must also condemn ourselves. Rear Window acts as a mirror, turning our moral gaze back upon us. The film become morally sentient, the viewer uncomfortably self-aware.
Characters constantly challenge Jeffrey’s habits, and in doing so, the audience’s voyeurism. We have already mentioned Stella, Jeff’s nurse, who is convinced he will be arrested. She also tells him, “We’ve become a race of peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change”, a subtle chiding of an audience who watches, and condemns, others, without first looking at themselves. In a later scene, seeking reassurance, Jeff muses, “I wonder if it is ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens.” Lisa replies “I’m not much on rear-window ethics”, implying the moral ambiguity of the activity and her discomfort regarding it. We get the feeling that they are talking about us, and that the “long-focus lens” is also a reference to Hitchcock’s camera. The fourth wall is not so much broken as disregarded — one might even say they are peeping over it.
I think it is this manipulation of gaze and guilt that elevates a Hitchcock film, this one in particular, above simply excellent craft into the realms of psychology, philosophy, and film-theory. Films like these turn upon themselves, questioning the ethics of composition and viewership. Rear Window also interrogates the status of the fictional character. In our minds, they have assumed a half-life; emotionally, we regard them as real people. They are real in the same sense that a photograph is real. So, if we can sympathise with them, adore them, respect them, is it still justified to strip them of their privacy and their rights by watching them? Hitchcock probes and exploits these sentiments, challenging our conception of film and questioning the relationship between fiction and reality.
I would like to highlight one other scene. Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), looking for evidence of murder, has broken into the salesman’s apartment. Simultaneously, Jeffrey sees the salesman returning. He is powerless because he is trapped in his wheelchair; he can only watch as the door is opened, Lisa is seen, grasped by the neck, the lights switched off. But Hitchcock has drawn us so deeply into Jeffrey’s perspective — we are voyeurs in cahoots — that the viewer is also trapped in that wheelchair. We must watch the contortions on Stewart’s face as he grapples with his impotence and frustration, and must grapple with these emotions ourselves. We must watch as Lisa is thrown to the floor and attacked. Fortunately, the police arrive in time. But we have been lucky — because we were complicit in the precedeing events, we feel ourselves responsible. This is a powerfully unsettling moment; I cannot recall ever being so immersed, and trapped, in a character’s perspective.
I have given only a taste of the magic Hitchcock has wrought. I will not spoil the rest of the film. Suffice to say, it is laden with tension, suffused in humour, romance, and drama, and is chock-full of those dearly loved Hitchcock tropes: the seductive blonde, the impotent man, voyeurism, and an acute visual genius. Behind all this loom Hitchcock’s pressing, persistent questions, and his vast and trenchant sympathy. My only complaint is that Hitchcock makes it increasingly difficult to enjoy your run-of-the-mill modern movie.
